Fundamental Queries
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | Fundamental Queries |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Mogens True Wegener |
| Keywords | Time, tense logic, Simultaneity, cosmology, metaphysics |
| Published | 2012 |
| No. of pages | 18 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
In this chapter we shall allow ourselves to consider the basic questions of physics which are those bordering on metaphysics.
Overview
This is the closing chapter of Mogens True Wegener's book on non-standard relativity, and it is a work of philosophy rather than of calculation. Wegener poses fifteen questions in sequence — What is Truth? Is the World Real? Is the World just One? Is the Universe Infinite? Does the Universe Expand? Is Nature Governed by Laws? Are Occurrences Predestined? Is Gravitation Instantaneous? Is Time Causally Dependent? Does Time Involve Change? Is Simultaneity Universal? Is the World Contingent? Is Nature Atemporal? Does Time Flow? What is Time? — and answers each in two or three pages, closing with a formal axiomatization.
The chapter's unifying commitment is that time is prior to everything else, including causality, space and the objects of physics. Wegener is a follower of A.N. Prior's tense logic and of C.F. von Weizsäcker's temporal reading of quantum theory, and his complaint against relativity is not primarily physical but logical: the spacetime formulation, he argues, treats tenses as fictitious, and "the widespread view that tenses are fictitious" he brands "a particularly pernicious sort of superstition". He is unusual among dissidents in accepting an Expanding Universe — he notes explicitly that most members of the Alternative Cosmology Group and of the Natural Philosophy Alliance "unanimously reject the concept", and suggests their attitude "is simply due to a shortage of imagination". His own preferred model is a modification of Milne's: a static sphere of finite radius containing an infinity of galaxy groups in steadily accelerating outward dispersion.
The queries
Truth, reality, and the one world (Q1-Q3)
Wegener distinguishes three accounts of truth — coherence, correspondence, consensus — and observes that scientific theories are asked to satisfy all three, while each has a defeater: consistency does not guarantee sound premises, incompatible theories can explain the same facts, and "even a large community can be mistaken". He notes these reservations are "particularly pertinent with respect to Einsteinian relativity". He sets out the Lukasiewicz propositional axioms and the move from Aristotelian subject-predicate logic to the predicate calculus, arguing that objects and properties "are constituted by way of the actions we perform on them and the operational procedures we expose them to" rather than by reference to substances.
On realism he takes a Kantian line: the structure of the world is assumed invariant across observers, but the Ding an sich is unreachable — "the hunt is like chasing a fata morgana in a desert" — and he quotes Rowlands: "There is no such thing as 'reality'". He then poses the problem that drives the rest of the chapter: because signals travel at finite speed, "when looking outwards, we look into the past". How does one pass from a world-view to a world-map if absolute Simultaneity is discarded? "Without this, the very notion of a world-map seems pointless."
Against the many-worlds interpretation and against tempo-modal "possible worlds" alike he invokes Ockham's razor: entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, therefore "Only One World can be real!" He is scathing about the accumulation of auxiliary hypotheses in Big Bang cosmology — uniformity, then CMB ripples for galaxy formation, then inflation to solve the resulting mixing problem — "a 'theory' describing the 'multiverse' as an exploding 'bubble-gum'".
Infinity and expansion (Q4-Q5)
Wegener rehearses Newton's problem of gravitating bodies in infinite space (an infinity of stars at rest would need a balance "infinitely more" precise than a needle on its tip), Einstein's static closed model and its instability, and Harrison's survey of Friedmann models — remarking that their common finiteness and metric shows "general relativity to be a technique rather than a genuine theory".
He accepts the cosmological redshift as recessional, crediting de Sitter's 1917 prediction of "a systematic displacement of spectral lines towards the red" and Robertson's 1928 statement of the distance-velocity proportionality, and taking care to distinguish dispersion of galaxies from expansion of cosmos. In his own model the cosmic sphere has fixed radius, the limiting horizon approached as r → ∞, while galaxies at rest in the CMB frame recede exponentially. The horizon — "neither an 'event horizon' nor a 'particle horizon' in the usual sense" — separates a potential infinity of observable galaxies from an actual infinity of unobservable zero-size ones, and lets a total energy be assigned to the sphere; following Rowlands he takes that energy to be zero, so that "the cosmic sphere is a perfect black hole", energy gain at the centre balanced by loss at the periphery. The cosmic redshift then dissolves Olbers' Paradox.
Law, fate, and gravitation (Q6-Q8)
He traces "law of nature" from Anaximander and Heraclitus through Newton, noting that Newton "after all renounced on explaining gravity, satisfying himself with describing it", and raises the possibility that all laws are statistical regularities — a view he says is corroborated by Milne's kinematic relativity, where gravity and electrodynamics become "statistical habits of nature induced by cosmic asymmetries".
On fatalism he presents the Master Argument of Diodoros Kronos and Aristotle's sea-battle reply, endorsing Aristotle's diagnosis that the fallacy lies in distributing the necessity operator over a disjunction, and pairs this with Weizsäcker's reading of quantum probability as "presentness of the future", "objective in a subject related way", so that "the reduction of the wave packet is nothing but a gain of information based on new knowledge".
The gravitation section is the most directly physical. Following Rowlands and Tom Van Flandern, Wegener holds that the speed of the force of gravity (as distinct from waves) must be infinite, citing Van Flandern's point that the Sun's gravity acts from its instantaneous true position while its light arrives from a different direction. He then reproduces Rowlands' catalogue of objections to General Relativity: that it provides no mechanism, merely describing how gravitation is measured; that it does not replace Newton but requires the Newtonian potential "be put in by hand" in the weak-field limit; that its nonlinearity "declares its own unreliability by producing unrenormalisable infinities"; that Schwarzschild's original solution was linear; that it is incompatible with experimentally corroborated nonlocality. Wegener's own departure from both Rowlands and Mach is stated plainly: "Rowlands wants to derive inertia from gravity, following Mach's principle, whereas I find it more natural to derive gravity from inertia, in opposition to Mach, but in agreement with Milne."
Time, causality and simultaneity (Q9-Q11)
Against the fashion for treating causal order as prior to temporal order, Wegener argues that the probabilistic, counterfactual and covering-law theories of causation all presuppose what they claim to explain. He gives a neat counterexample to Reichenbach's mark method: the definition requires that a small variation of the earlier event be transmissible to the later but not conversely; but drop a pea into a round bowl, "vary the throw as much as you wish", and the result is always a pea at the centre. His own definition reverses the order — given an energetic system whose stages have a clear temporal order, "any earlier stage is causally connected to any later stage".
For simultaneity he quotes Prior at length: "having happened" is not a property an event can have from one point of view and not another; "relativity or no relativity, if I say I saw a certain flash before you, and you say you saw it first, one of us is just wrong". The relativistic t is then "just part of an artificial framework which the scientists have constructed to link together observed facts in the simplest way possible". Prior's analogy is to Berkeley's critique of the early calculus, vindicated only after a century and a half. Wegener reinforces this with John Bell's remark that "the cheapest resolution is something like going back to relativity as it was before Einstein, when people like Lorentz and Poincaré thought that there was an aether — a preferred frame of reference".
Contingency, and the limits of a theory of everything (Q12)
Wegener treats Rowlands' nilpotent programme with admiration and then denies its central ambition. Rowlands starts from nothing, with two dual rules — create and conserve — and the nilpotent Dirac operator (ikE + i'p + ij'm)(ikE + i'p + ij'm) = 0, from which a universal computational rewrite system (NUCRS) is meant to generate physics, the genetic code, brain and language, and to escape Gödel incompleteness. Wegener's reply is Prior's: one may build a calculus rich enough to state its own syntax, but not its own semantics, and completeness cannot be asserted within the system. "Even if Rowlands had succeeded in mapping all the invariant laws and pure numbers of all possible worlds, the abyss between possibility and factuality would not be bridged."
Tense logic, and the system J (Q13-Q15)
Wegener sides with the A-theorists against the B-theorists — with Prior against McTaggart and Mellor — holding that "all real existence is present and only present existence is real". His system J extends the Kripke-Prior future-branching system Kb with Peircean temporal modalities. Its distinctive move concerns Prior's notion of statability: as the future actualizes, possibilities are irrevocably lost, but this loss "is compensated by a steady increase in the sum of statable truth", since propositions not previously statable become so and thereafter remain so. This gives what Wegener calls a creation of truth, and he takes it to show "the passage of time is mind-independent".
The final section sets out the axiomatics: operators N ("henceforth"), H ("hitherto"), with P, M, L, O defined from them; the Lukasiewicz propositional axioms; eight axioms for Kb (past linearity, transitivity and density of M, inevitability implying possibility); the S5 axioms for omnitemporal necessity; two axioms of his own for instant-propositions ("instant-propositions are unrepeatable"; "the order of instant-propositions is linear"); and three Meredith-style axioms for a unique proposition w, "the world" — the world is present, the world is contingent, and the world "necessarily comprises everything true just now". The chapter ends with a stanza from Paradiso xxxiii.
Assessment
The chapter's distinctive value is that it puts a philosophical case that is usually left implicit in dissident work about relativity, and puts it with real technical competence. Wegener knows the literature he is drawing on — Prior, Weizsäcker, Reichenbach, Øhrstrøm, van Fraassen — and the pea-in-the-bowl counterexample to Reichenbach's mark method is a genuinely good objection, compact and decisive against the version stated. His distinction between the dispersion of galaxies and the expansion of space is a real clarification, too often blurred; and his willingness to accept expansion while disagreeing with his own community about it is intellectually honest in a way that deserves noting. The Prior quotation on simultaneity is the strongest passage in the chapter, because it identifies precisely where the dispute lies: not in the Lorentz transformations, which Wegener does not contest, but in whether the relativity of simultaneity is a fact about the world or an artifact of a coordinate convention. That is a legitimate philosophical question, and Bell's own remark shows it is not a crank one.
The weaknesses follow from the format. Fifteen questions in eighteen pages means most arguments are gestured at rather than made. The claim that Kripke semantics settles anything about physical time, the claim that the world is "a system of zero energy", and the claim that his cosmic sphere is "a perfect black hole" are all asserted in single sentences with no derivation; the last in particular equates a horizon defined by exponential recession with an event horizon in the general-relativistic sense, which is exactly what the surrounding text denies it is. The Milne-derived model is never written down: there is no metric, no field equation, no expression connecting the "steadily accelerating dispersion" to an observable, and the Poincaré-pressure suggestion is attributed to Pierseaux in half a clause. A reader cannot tell what the model predicts, and so cannot test it.
The critique of general relativity is second-hand and inherits its problems. Reproducing Rowlands' list wholesale means reproducing its weakest items: "it destroys the foundation of a series of important symmetries" and "it has lead to the perverse idea that high-brow math is needed at a fundamental level" are complaints of taste, not results. The Van Flandern argument about instantaneous gravity is presented without its standard answer — that in general relativity, and equally in Lorentz-invariant field theories, the leading aberration terms cancel because the interaction depends on velocity and acceleration as well as position, so that no superluminal propagation is required to point the force at the instantaneous position. The measurement that bears directly on this is the binary pulsar orbital decay, PSR B1913+16 and later systems, whose observed period derivative matches the quadrupole-formula prediction to better than a percent and which would not do so if the gravitational interaction were instantaneous. Wegener does not mention it.
The deepest tension is internal. Wegener wants absolute simultaneity restored, a preferred frame, and time flowing mind-independently — while also accepting the cosmological redshift, the CMB rest frame, and a Milne-type kinematics whose entire construction is a coordinate reparametrization of Minkowski space. Milne's t-scale and τ-scale are two descriptions of one geometry, and using the freedom to move between them is precisely the conventionalism about simultaneity that Prior's argument is deployed against. Wegener notices half of this — he correctly says Milne "did not take space to be real", that flat mapping is "our own free choice based on convention" — but does not confront the consequence: if the flat description is conventional, the preferred frame it supplies cannot bear the metaphysical weight of making one of two observers "just wrong".
Read as philosophy of time rather than as physics, the chapter is a serious and literate piece of work, and the system J is a real formal contribution with an interesting idea at its centre — that the loss of possibility and the gain of statable truth are two aspects of one process. Read as a critique of relativity it is a survey of other people's objections, and the cosmological model it advertises remains a sketch.